Axle Davids, Distility’s President and CEO, draws on his years as a technology entrepreneur and on his extensive branding experience with such clients as AT&T Mobility, Ericsson, and Applied Biosystem to reveal the critical components of winning corporate and product brands. In a two-part seminar called Pragmatic Branding: How to Create Brands That Are Simple, Social and Successful, Axle focuses on:

• Brand Strategy: The steps required to quickly define a brand that is compelling, authentic and easy to socialize
• Brand Tactics: How to express your brand for maximum impact, especially for Search & Social Media

Part One: The New Brand Strategy
Your brand strategy plays a decisive role in creating loyalty. With a strong brand, your investors, prospects, customers and team will cross the confidence gap and become loyal to you. If, like most technology brands, your brand is diffuse, conformist or fragmented, we’ve got news for you: That’s bad for business. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In part One of this seminar, Axle helps you:

• Identify if your brand is conformist, diffuse, fragmented, or authentic. Learn the critical factors to ensure an authentic brand emerges from your branding efforts.
• Uncover an easy to grasp “Plug & Play” branding model that fits on one page, that you and your team can use to streamline and strengthen your marketing efforts.
• Question how your brand is positioned to be sure it makes a difference in how prospects resolve their needs with you instead of competitors.
• Avoid the most common technology brand strategy blunders.
• Learn how to determine your brand personality – the tone and manner you want expressed consistently through all customer experiences.
• Find out why your brand promise is your most important marketing idea, and how to distill that idea out of your team’s top passions and your audience’s greatest need.
• Save time, money and headaches by determining the right naming architecture for your portfolio, be it masterbrand like Rogers Communications, overbrand like Apple, or freestanding like Fido.

Part Two: The New Brand Tactics
Internet Advertising has already eclipsed TV advertising in the UK. Your brand must be primed first and foremost to survive and thrive online. Based on the learning from Session One, “The New Brand Strategy” you’ll learn what it takes to avoid the most common branding missteps, and make the best moves possible.

• Grasp the new do-it-yourself ethos in Internet marketing, where cheap and sincere trump expensive and contrived.
• Discover where traditional technology naming techniques backfire online.
• Learn best practices for naming with the Web in mind — be it for your company, solutions, domains, Twitter names, blog names, and social media group names.
• See examples of the right and wrong way to choose your brand’s descriptor and keyphrase.
• Learn best practices for ensuring that your brand’s visuals and messages break through the noise and get noticed while remaining true to your brand promise, personality and position.
• See how to use Search & Social Media to cheaply prototype, test, and measure your names, taglines and creative campaigns for greater speed, efficiency and success.

During both sessions, participants will have opportunities to reflect on their brands, halt inefficient branding practices, and quickly break through to a brand that simplifies, unites, and sells. We encourage team members to attend together so they can collectively create their brand.

About Axle Davids, Keynote Speaker
Axle Davids, founder of Distility Branding, is a visionary brand developer and pioneering brand technologist. In 2001, he established aXle Branding, which focused on branding and design for industry innovators such as AutoShare Car Sharing Network, AT&T Mobility and Applied Biosystems.

This venture has evolved into Distility Branding. Before starting aXle Branding, Davids was Creative Director at two of Canada’s top interactive agencies, My Virtual Model and Extend Media, where he oversaw more than 150 interactive design projects for high-profile brands including Land’s End, Cosmopolitan, Disney and Apple.